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AMD announced this morning that it’s been awarded $12.6 million by the Department of Energy for research into the DoE’s Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development Program. The program — we’ve cheekily titled it ESC-R&D — is designed to outsource the creation of new solutions to the exascale computing problem. DARPA launched its own exascale development program earlier this year; the two projects appear to be unaffiliated but clearly overlap as far as their mandate is concerned. AMD’s $12.6 million aggregate award is actually two separate amounts for two different projects — $9.6M for processor-related research, and $3M for memory research.

AMD has worked with the government before in other supercomputing initiatives. The Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is AMD-powered, and the company won a major contract last year to update that system with some 19,200 Opterons based on the new Bulldozer/Interlagos core. The first stage of that upgrade is now complete and the Jaguar (now renamed Titan) currently packs a total of 299,008 Opteron cores, 600 terabytes of RAM, and 960 Fermi GPUs.

Systems need to be an order of magnitude more compact to allow for exa-scale buildouts. This is a Cray XK-6 blade -- The Titan supercomputer will have thousands of these.

The fact that it takes nearly $300,000 of CPUs to break into the petaflop range gives some idea of how difficult hitting exascale targets is. The situation itself was aptly captured by the great philosopher Douglas Adams, who wrote: “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Exascale computing, as it happens, is an awful lot like the manned mission to Mars we keep putting off. It’s incredibly ambitious and would stretch current resources to the limit, but we could build an exascale computer with currently developed approaches.

The problem, in both cases, is one of scale and return on investment. In addition to their high performance target, exascale computers must maintain low RAM access times, offer high RAM bandwidth, and be capable of accessing storage quickly, all while drawing less power than a sparsely populated western state.

Obviously AMD winning these sorts of grants is a nice feather in the company’s cap, and probably a bit of an attempt to distract from the company’s second quarter earnings warning. On Monday, AMD announced that it expected Q2 revenue to drop 11% sequentially. Previously, Sunnyvale had expected Q2 revenue to rise ~3% compared to Q1. The company states that the drop is due to weak sales in China and Europe, as well as a weaker buying environment in the United States. The company’s share price has tumbled 16% since the announcement, from a high of $5.75 at the opening of the market on Monday to it’s current price of $4.90.

A revenue hit that large will make it difficult for the company to post a profit; AMD’s non-GAAP operating income in Q1 was $138M on revenue of $1.59B. Intel hasn’t made any comments on whether or not weak markets overseas and in the US have hurt its own sales, but its only been a few weeks since the NPD Group claimed that ultrabooks were responsible for a sharp uptick in mobile ASPs (average selling prices). Combined, the two trends imply that AMD hasn’t had much luck piggybacking its own ultrathin initiative on top of Intel’s ultrabooks — though it’ll be a few quarters more before Sunnyvale’s program really has a chance to make an impact on the company’s bottom line.

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